The cash supply chain is manual, complex, has inherent risk issues, and is dispersed throughout a network of customers, armored carriers, the Fed (Federal Reserve), and/or a network of client facing devices including but not limited to automatic teller machines (ATMs), cash vaults, banking centers, safes, cash recyclers, and other cash handling devices. The costs of depositing, distributing, and managing cash across a major bank, as well as the amount of daily excess cash carried by such a bank, can be on the order of billions of dollars.
Today's client deposit process does not adequately allow clients to view the status of their deposit bag as it makes its way from the client's site where the deposit was prepared to the bank or bank's representative who will continue the processing of the deposit. Deposit bags are handled multiple times in the current process (and possibly by many different parties), which increases potential errors and complicates finding missing deposits or understanding where errors occurred and assigning fiduciary responsibility for those errors. Pertinent pieces of deposit data are typically manually entered and reentered into various systems throughout the end-to-end processing of the deposit. The collaboration and sharing of information across multiple organizations and with multiple vendors may make this process very complex and increases risk to the bank and bank clients.
While a number of techniques have been attempted to automate transaction handling, there remains a need to increase the flexibility, efficiency, and accuracy of a cash transaction process that encompasses cash deposits and change orders. Bank customers need to deposit cash and to obtain cash on a timely basis. Consequently, it is desirable to increase the flexibility, convenience, speed, and accuracy of cash transactions and to reduce the labor required to perform the transactions. It is also desirable to make information relating to a cash transaction rapidly available to both the client and the bank and to support cash transactions that accommodate a customer's timely needs.